Thursday, July 20, 2006

At long last, Kerberos for Windows 3.1 is nearing release

After more than seven months of waiting MIT Kerberos for Windows 3.1 is finally going to begin beta testing. This release will fix all of the bugs that plagued KFW 3.0 Network Identity Manager 1.0. The memory leaks, the principal name rejections, the non-en_US locale problems. They are all gone.

In addition, KFW 3.1 will not crash on Windows XP64 WOW64 simply because Microsoft failed to actually export tickets from the LSA even though the functions succeed. (This problem is fixed in Vista Beta 2.)

Along with KFW 3.1 will be a new version of the AFS plug-in installer. Now that the NetIDMgr APIs are truly stable the AFS plug-in can be integrated into an OpenAFS release. That said, the KFW 3.1 release will install on 64-bit Windows systems but there will not be 64-bit native support until KFW 3.2.

The most dramatic changes in KFW 3.1 are in the NetIDMgr. The user interface is much more fleshed out. In the main window tickets can be sorted in arbitrary ways by clicking the column headers. The View->Columns menu allows the user to select which ticket properties should be displayed. The properties include everything from principal names to lifetimes to enc-types to key version numbers. Tool Tips are supported for the toolbar. The font used to display tickets is user selectable. Identities can be added without obtaining credentials via the Global Identity Settings. The Kerberos 5 Realm configuration editor is complete. Kerberos 5 credentials can now be obtained from FILE: ccaches. In general, the overall look and feel of the tool is significantly improved.

I look forward to being able to announce on Tuesday July 25th that the installers are available for download.